•Wonder GuchuAbout five years ago, I decided to stop writing about the arts because of two things: I felt I was dying together with the arts, and because I wanted to cast off the label ‘he is an arts journalist’.
I stayed away from exhibitions, stuck to my old music and steered clear of artists’ paths. I went into hiding by taking up other columns and changing desks in the newsroom. Until now, I was convinced that the part of me that resisted dying with the arts had won.
Until Martha Mukaiwa decided to take a break! And I find myself kicking up dust and biting my tongue, fighting the urge to stay away from the arts.
But well, I am not sure now, although I know for certain the arts are no longer what they used to be. I know the music is not what it used to be either. I also know for certain that apart from my age – advanced that is – a part of the soul in the arts has died.
I mean, much of it does not have the power to last, to hang on, to bounce back and reclaim territories. It’s the classic effect that has died. All because real art is not for fame or celebrity status but it’s a part of the artist’s soul.
Indeed, whoever chooses genuine art chooses madness. Isn’t it why most artists behave the way they do – lost? There is always an element of eccentricity in a genuine artist which one does not find in pretenders.
The literal world has Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath, Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe and Dambudzo Marechera – all bent upstairs. In music there are a lot of schizophrenics – Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Sinéad O’Connor who made fame with the aching ballad ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and yes, to some extent Michael Jackson was one too. Don’t forget Brenda Fassie, mad as hell.
This could explain why genuine artists die with their art because it was not only art but a lifestyle. These days anyone can be anything, especially with the digital world prevailing. People can create what they cannot be. Just that whatever they come up with is so impersonal, detached and empty. It’s soulless.
It’s this emptiness – after years of following the art world – which drove me into wandering, into searching for comfortable corners in the newsroom. To fall in love with something true, something real, something close to the heart. Like trying to find a place far from the madding crowd.
To find myself. To run away from the emptiness I listen to when I play new songs by soulless pretenders, when I come across a piece of canvas splashed with ink or oil in the name of art, or when I pick up a neatly arranged sheaf of papers that are supposed to be a book.
It’s worse when one is expected to make an opinion on such pieces. What does one say when much of it is devoid of life? What opinion does one have to pass on emptiness?
Or maybe it’s only me, sulking under this heavy bag full of years spent chasing the arts dream, searching for the soul of the art.
I must be right because even Martha – young and energetic as she is – has taken a break from it all to find herself among the monks in Thailand! I understand how it feels, trying to make sense out of senselessness. Despair!
